Loading...
Please wait for a bit
Trump puts pressure on Senate majority leader in blunt message: pass strict voter ID bill – live
Click any word to translate
Original article by Shrai Popat (now); Lucy Campbell and Tom Ambrose (earlier)
Cornyn doubles down on SAVE Act while backtracking on support for filibuster in new op-ed
John Cornyn, the Texas Republican fighting to hold his US Senate, backtracked on his previous support for the legislative filibuster in order to pledge his support for Donald Trump’s “number one priority” – the SAVE America Act – and hopefully secure the president’s endorsement in the process.
In an op-ed published in the New York Post on Wednesday, Cornyn said that Democrats are “weaponizing the Senate’s rules” to block the voter ID legislation from advancing.
“After careful consideration, I support whatever changes to Senate rules that may prove necessary for us to get the SAVE America Act and homeland security funding past the Democrats’ obstruction, through the Senate, and on the president’s desk for his signature,” Cornyn wrote.
The incumbent is set to face attorney general Ken Paxton in a May run-off after neither candidate secured 50% of the vote in the Texas primary earlier this month.
Trump held off backing either Texas GOP candidate, but recently said that he would announce an endorsement soon. He’s also homed in on the SAVE America Act as his most important legislative concern – refusing to sign any other bills until it is passed in Congress.
Updated
Reporting from Hebron, Kentucky
Amid thunderstorms and a tornado warning, hundreds of people have lined up outside a packaging plant in northern Kentucky this afternoon to see the president.
One was Chuck Wills, a 76-year-old Vietnam veteran who waited in line for three hours this morning to secure a front-row seat to see Donald Trump.
“It was worth it,” he says.
For Wills, who lives locally, it’s his first time seeing Trump in person, although he’s not unaware of the challenges facing the country. He says the economy will take some time improve.
“There’s going to be a little pain before it turns around,” he says.
Updated
On Iran’s new leaders, Donald Trump added: “We knocked out twice their leadership, and now they have a new group coming up. Let’s see what happens to them.”
A reminder that Trump has consistently expressed strong disapproval of Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, son of the assassinated ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
In recent days, Trump has said his appointment was a “big mistake” and suggested he wouldn’t “last long” without US approval.
Speaking to reporters at a pharmaceutical company in Cincinnati, Ohio, Donald Trump continued to refer to the US-Israel war on Iran as an “excursion”.
When asked why he keeps using “war” and “excursion” interchangeably, the president said: “It’s both.”
It’s both an excursion that will keep us out of a war. For them it’s a war. For us, it turned out to be easier than we thought.
Trump went on to say that the US has hit “28 mine ships as of this moment”. This is up from the 16 that US Central Command said it “eliminated” near the strait of Hormuz on Tuesday.
The president also tried to assuage concerns about the whipsawing price of oil. “I would say it went up a little bit less than we thought. It’s going to come down more than anybody understands,” he told reporters in Ohio.
Updated
The FBI warned California police departments that Iran could retaliate against US attacks by launching drones at the west coast, according to ABC News, citing a reviewed alert that was distributed at the end of February.
“Iran allegedly aspired to conduct a surprise attack using unmanned aerial vehicles from an unidentified vessel off the coast of the United State Homeland, specifically against unspecified targets in California, in the event that the US conducted strikes against Iran,” the alert read, according to ABC. “We have no additional information on the timing, method, target, or perpetrators of this alleged attack.”
Neither the FBI field office in Los Angeles nor the White House immediately responded to ABC’s request for comment.
Updated
Key event
The US state department said on Wednesday that Iran and Iran-aligned militas may be planning to target US-owned oil and energy infrastructure and hotels in Iraq.
In a post on X, the US embassy in Baghdad said: “Iran-aligned terrorist militias have also targeted hotels frequented by Americans throughout Iraq, including the Iraqi Kurdistan Region (IKR).”
It urged US citizens in Iraq to “remain vigilant, maintain a low profile and stay away from areas that could make them a target”.
Updated
Trump issues blunt message to Senate majority leader to pass voter ID legislation
As John Thune battles conservative blowback for refusing to alter Senate rules and mandate a traditional “talking” filibuster that would force Democrats to hold the floor to block the Save America Act, Donald Trump had a blunt message for the Senate majority leader. “He’s got to be a leader,” the president told reporters outside the White House today.
The upper chamber’s top Republican has said he’ll likely hold a vote on the legislation, which requires proof of citizenship while registering to vote and significantly curbs mail-in voting, next week. However, staunch Democratic opposition means it will fall short of the 60-vote threshold needed to advance.
Thune has said the votes “aren’t there” for a talking filibuster, or doing away with the legislative filibuster altogether – the so-called “nuclear” option. Today, Trump said it was up to the South Dakota lawmaker to “get them” regardless.
Updated
The president said that US forces were working “very hard” for Lebanon. This comes as Lebanon’s ministry of health said on Wednesday that 634 people have been killed in Israeli strikes against Beirut. “We’re working on it very hard. We love Lebanon,” Trump said. “We got to get rid of the Hezbollah. Has been a disaster for many years.”
While speaking to reporters today, Donald Trump evaded a question about the bombing of an Iranian girls’ school that killed at least 175 people. Earlier we noted that a preliminary investigation found that the US is to blame for the strike, according to a report from the New York Times.
When asked whether he takes responsibility for the attack, the president simply replied: “I don’t know about it.” This comes after Trump insisted that Iran was to blame in recent days, despite mounting evidence that suggests US liability.
Updated
When asked what it will take for the military action against Iran to end, Trump added that it requires “more of the same”. Earlier, the president told Axios that the war would end “soon” since the there is “practically nothing left to target” in Iran.
Outside the White House, Trump extolled how much headway US forces have made against Iran: “They’ve lost their navy, they’ve lost their air force … We could take them out by this afternoon, in fact, within an hour, they literally would never be able to build that country.”
Updated
Donald Trump just spoke to reporters briefly outside the White House.
Asked if oil companies should be using the strait of Hormuz, the critical waterway for shipping oil and liquefied natural gas where traffic has effectively ground to a halt amid the US-Israeli war on Iran, Trump said:
I think they should.
Iran has reportedly deployed about a dozen mines in the strait and reiterated today that any ships belonging to the United States, Israel or their allies passing through the strait could be targeted.
An Iranian drone attack in Kuwait that killed six US service members in the early hours of the US-Israeli war on Iran was more severe than previously revealed, with dozens suffering injuries including brain trauma, shrapnel wounds and burns, multiple sources have told CBS News, with at least one requiring the amputation of a limb.
More than 30 military members remained in hospital on Tuesday night with injuries from the attack on a tactical operations center at the Shuaiba port outside Kuwait City, according to CBS News’s report.
The Pentagon said yesterday that about 140 US service members had been injured so far in the US-Israeli war on Iran.
“The vast majority of these injuries have been minor, and 108 service members have already returned to duty. Eight service members remain listed as severely injured and are receiving the highest level of medical care,” Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said in a statement.
Donald Trump and several members of his cabinet joined the families of the six US soldiers killed in the strike during a “dignified transfer” ritual at Dover air force base on Saturday.
Updated
A man was taken into custody earlier after driving his van into a security barrier outside the White House this morning, the Secret Service confirmed to the Guardian.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the agency said the man crashed into the temporary security barrier just before 6.30am. He was immediately arrested by officers from the Secret Service’s uniformed division.
The man, whose identity was not immediately released, was being interviewed by investigators. Criminal charges were pending, the Secret Service said.
A police bomb squad was called to the scene, checked the vehicle and determined it to be safe.
Updated
Preliminary investigation says US to blame for bombing of Iranian girls' school – report
A preliminary investigation into the bombing of an Iranian girls’ elementary school found that the US is to blame for the strike that killed at least 175 people, according to the New York Times.
Citing unnamed officials familiar with the preliminary findings, the Times reports that Tomahawk missile strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school was the result of a “targeting mistake” by the US military, which was conducting strikes on an adjacent Iranian base, which used to include the school building.
The Guardian has previously reported on the growing body of evidence that shows the US to be responsible for the attack.
According to the officials briefed on the preliminary investigation whom the Times spoke with, officers at US Central Command (Centcom) created target coordinates for the strike “using outdated data provided by the Defense Intelligence Agency”.
The officials emphasized that “there are important unanswered questions about why the outdated information had not been double checked”.
Donald Trump has insisted that Iran bears responsibility for the attack, despite admitting that he “doesn’t know enough” about the strike, and administration officials are withholding blame until a full report is released. The president has said he is “willing to live” with the investigation’s findings.
Updated
Senator Rick Scott says Trump has 'no interest' in boots on the ground in Iran
The Republican senator Rick Scott, who sits on the upper chamber’s armed services and foreign relations committees, said that Donald Trump “has no interest in troops on the ground” in Iran, during an interview with CNN.
On Tuesday, after a closed-door briefing with defense and state officials, Democrats on the Senate armed services committee lambasted the Trump administration’s “incoherent” strategy when it comes to the US-Israel war on Iran. “This is a disaster of epic proportions. It’s already getting Americans killed. It’s driving up prices here at home,” Chris Murphy said in a TV interview after the meeting.
Scott said that Democrats were being “disingenuous” about the possibility of Trump sending US soldiers to Iran – a move that he hasn’t entirely ruled out.
“There’s nothing in this briefing that said that we are going to put troops on the ground. There was nothing,” the GOP lawmaker from Florida told CNN.
Scott added that while it is going to be “very difficult” to open the strait of Hormuz, the administration “clearly” has a plan. This comes after the US military said it attacked and destroyed 16 Iranian mine-laying vessels near the crucial waterway. On Tuesday, CNN reported that Iran has begun laying explosive devices in the strait in recent days.
“Nobody wants to see gas prices up,” Scott said. “So we want prices to come down. I think, unfortunately, prices are going to be up for a while until this ends.”
Updated
A Democrat won a special election for a state house seat in New Hampshire on Tuesday, flipping a Republican district that Donald Trump carried and marking the latest in a string of 28 Democratic upsets that could usher in a blue wave in the midterms.
Bobbi Boudman beat Republican Dale Fincher in New Hampshire’s Carroll county district 7. It was Boudman’s third try at the seat – she lost to incumbent representative Glenn Cordelli in the last two cycles by several points. Cordelli resigned from the seat after moving, leading to the special election on 10 March.
Unofficial results show Boudman winning with about 52% of the vote among the more than 4,000 voters who turned out.
Marissa Hebert, a spokesperson for the New Hampshire Democratic party, noted on X the swing Boudman made in the district: she lost in 2024 by more than 13 points. “Bad day for @NHGOP!” Hebert wrote.
National Democrats pointed to Boudman’s win as part of a pattern of Democrats winning in red and toss-up areas: Democrats have now flipped 28 seats since Trump won in November 2024, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC) said. Republicans have not flipped any.
The committee hopes for more wins this year, with a strategy that could deliver the biggest Democratic gains in two decades, Heather Williams, the DLCC’s president, said.
Updated
Trump says 'practically nothing left to target' in Iran and war will end 'soon' - report
Donald Trump said that the US-Israel war in Iran will end “soon” because there is “practically nothing left to target” in a phone interview with Axios.
“Any time I want it to end, it will end,” the president told the outlet. “The war is going great. We are way ahead of the timetable. We have done more damage than we thought possible, even in the original six-week period.”
It’s the latest update in a series of inconsistent messages from the administration on the estimated timeline of the war. On Tuesday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the president would ultimately determine when Iran is “in a place of unconditional surrender”. However, earlier this week, Trump told CBS News that the war is “very complete”, while touting how US forces have degraded the Iranian regime’s military capabilities.
This appears to be in contrast to his comments last week, where he suggested that the conflict could continue for as long as he deems necessary: “Whatever the time is, it’s OK, whatever it takes.”
In the midst of these mixed messages, defense secretary Pete Hegseth has insisted that the war would not be an exercise in “endless nation building”, while putting daylight between the bombing campaign on Iran and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Updated
Centcom commander says US hit Iranian ballistic missile facility in 'most intense' day of strikes
In a video update, Adm Brad Cooper – the commander of US Central Command (Centcom) – said that the US has “hit more than 5500 targets inside Iran, including more than 60 ships,” since the beginning of Operation Epic Fury 11 days ago.
Cooper also noted that US forces took out the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ four remaining “Soleimani class warships”, and hit a large Iranian ballistic missile manufacturing facility. “It’s not just about what’s shooting at us today. It’s also about eliminating the threat in the future,” Cooper said.
The admiral added that Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks “have dropped drastically”, but pointed out that Iranian forces continue to “deliberately target innocent civilians in Gulf countries while hiding behind their own people”.
In response to the latest inflation data, released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Elizabeth Warren, top Democrat on the Senate banking committee, said that the fact US inflation remained at 2.4% last month is proof that Donald Trump is “making life less affordable” for Americans.
“Instead of fixing the economic pain he’s caused, Trump single-handedly dragged the United States into a war with Iran, which will lead to even higher prices for families – from the gas pump and the grocery store to airline tickets and shipping costs,” the Massachusetts lawmakers said in a statement.
It’s worth noting that the latest figures from BLS capture the price of goods before the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran, and oil prices whipsawed in the last week.
Ahead of his visit to congressman Thomas Massie’s district in northern Kentucky, Donald Trump has continued to denigrate the Republican lawmaker on Truth Social.
“I predict that ‘Representative’ Thomas Massie will go down as the WORST Republican Congressman in the long and fabled history of the United States Congress,” the president wrote, before listing several other GOP representatives who have bucked Trump in recent years. Including those like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who sat on the congressional committee that investigated the president’s role in the January 6th insurrection.
“They are all misfits and losers,” Trump said, “but Massie, who is running against a great American Patriot in the Kentucky Primary, will hopefully lose BIG.” As I noted earlier, Trump has backed Massie’s challenger, Ed Gallrein.
Latest data shows that US inflation remains at 2.4%
The latest consumer price index report showed that US inflation remained at an annual rate of 2.4% in February.
The data does not reflect the hike in average gasoline prices since the beginning of the US-Israel war on Iran.
Overall, prices rose 0.3% from January.
Donald Trump will make the next stops on his affordability tour on Wednesday. He’ll start the day in Washington, before travelling to Cincinnati, Ohio for a site visit of a pharmaceutical company. Then he’ll deliver remarks in Hebron, Kentucky at a packaging facility.
We can certainly expect more from Trump about his administration’s aims to lower the cost of prescription drug prices. And we’ll be listening out for more about the ongoing US-Israel war on Iran, and escalating gas prices for every day Americans.
Notably, this patch of northern Kentucky sits in Thomas Massie’s congressional district. Trump has insulted the Republican representative on several occasions, and even endorsed Massie’s GOP primary challenger, Ed Gallrein.
We’ll bring you the latest lines things get under way.
New details are leading experts to fear that an “unethical” vaccine trial in Guinea-Bissau is the “prototype” for studies under Robert F Kennedy Jr, secretary of the US department of health and human services (HHS) and longtime vaccine critic.
At the center of US vaccine policy is an unlikely set of Danish researchers whose work on the health effects of vaccines has been called into question. The study in Guinea-Bissau would have looked at the overall health effects of giving hepatitis B vaccines by only vaccinating half of the newborns in the study at birth despite an 18% prevalence rate in adults of the illness, which can lead to serious and sometimes fatal health consequences.
Stand Up for Science, a science and health nonprofit in the US, sent an investigator to Guinea-Bissau to look at public records and interview experts. The organization met with members of Congress on 19 February to share these results in an unreleased report, obtained by the Guardian, that raises concerns about how deeply the Bandim Health Project is enmeshed in public health in Guinea-Bissau and the challenges to conducting ethical research in this setting – with immense repercussions for how US research will be carried out under Kennedy.
“We are fearful that this is a prototype for other studies,” said Colette Delawalla, founder of Stand Up for Science. The US could fund global studies with the similar ethical concerns as the Tuskegee experiment five or 10 or 100 times a year, she said. “It could be extraordinarily deadly.” Stand Up for Science held nationwide rallies on Saturday to protest moves like these.
Trump’s pick for state department role withdraws after backlash over past ‘anti-Israel’ and race remarks
Donald Trump’s nominee for a top diplomatic post has been withdrawn from consideration after a growing backlash over his past remarks on race and Jewish people left him without crucial Republican support.
Jeremy Carl, who had been tapped to serve as the assistant secretary of state for international organisations – a role overseeing US policy towards bodies such as the UN – announced on Tuesday that he was stepping aside after failing to secure unanimous backing from Republicans on the Senate foreign relations committee.
In a statement posted on X, Carl thanked Trump and the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, for their support but acknowledged that it would not be enough to secure confirmation.
“With unanimous opposition from Senate Democrats to my candidacy, we also needed the unanimous support of every GOP [Grand Old Party] senator on the Committee on Foreign Relations,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, at this time this unanimous support was not forthcoming.”
The Senate foreign relations committee normally votes on nominations before sending them to the full Senate. Carl’s prospects had appeared shaky since his confirmation hearing in February, when one Republican member of the panel publicly broke ranks.
John Curtis, a Senator for Utah, who is regarded as one of the more moderate Republicans in the chamber, said afterwards that he could not support the nomination, citing Carl’s record of comments on Israel and Jewish people.
“I find his anti-Israel views and insensitive remarks about the Jewish people unbecoming of the position for which he has been nominated,” Curtis said.
Jeffrey Epstein’s former accountant who went on to become the executor of his estate, Richard Kahn, will face questions behind closed doors today before the House Oversight Committee.
Kahn, who was associated with the paedophile for over a decade, managing investments and finances in his final years. He was also responsible for renovations on Epstein’s Caribbean island.
He was one of two executors of of Epstein’s estate, with the other, lawyer Darren Indyke scheduled to answer questions next week.
In February, Epstein’s estate agreed to pay as much as $35m to resolve a class-action lawsuit that accused the two advisers of aiding and abetting his sex trafficking of young women and teenage girls, according to a court filing.
In the 2024 lawsuit, lawyers at Boies Schiller Flexner said Indyke and Kahn helped Epstein create a complex web of corporations and bank accounts that let him hide his abuses and pay victims and recruiters, while leaving them “richly compensated” for their work.
Democrats eye rare window of opportunity in Georgia runoff to replace Marjorie Taylor Greene
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.
The Democrat Shawn Harris will go head-to-head with Republican Clay Fuller in a runoff after they came out ahead in a special election to replace Marjorie Taylor Greene in Congress on Tuesday night.
The election for the state’s 14th congressional district has been seen as a test of Donald Trump’s sway and may provide a rare opportunity for Democrats in a deep-red pocket of north-west Georgia.
Former prosecutor Fuller has Trump’s endorsement and had raised more than $1m leading into voting on Tuesday, but Harris, a retired army general who faced Greene two years ago, has raised more than four times as much.
Fuller said he was confident he could bring Republicans together. Speaking on Tuesday evening, he said:
I think the Republican party is going to unite around us because they know that the Democrat is too dangerous. We can’t have a Democrat representing Georgia 14. That would be a tragedy for our community, a tragedy for Georgia 14 and a tragedy for the Maga movement.
Even though four Republican candidates dropped out before the election, the Republican field was fractured among more than a dozen candidates, including former state senator Colton Moore, a combative agitator to the right of most Republican legislators in Georgia.
By contrast, Harris contrasted himself with Greene’s bomb-throwing style, saying practical-minded Republicans should vote for him because he will work for constituents “not for somebody else who’s already in DC”. He said:
The way I’m going to go to Congress is that it’s going to be a coalition of Democrats, independents and Republicans.
Fuller and Harris will face each other again on 7 April, and the winner will complete the rest of Greene’s term through the end of this year with hopes of re-election.
Read our full report here:
In other developments:
The Pentagon chief, Pete Hegseth, has warned that Tuesday would be the “most intense” day of US strikes yet, even as he blamed Iran for civilian casualties by claiming its forces were firing missiles from schools and hospitals. Speaking alongside Gen Dan Caine, the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, Hegseth alleged Iran was deliberately firing missiles from schools and hospitals, describing the country’s leadership as “desperate and scrambling like the terrorist cowards they are”. More here.
The minelayers near the strait of Hormuz were among multiple Iranian vessels taken out by US forces today, according to a post by the US Central Command. In a post on X, the military published unclassified footage of some of the vessels after Donald Trump warned Iran against laying mines in the critical waterway.
Mike Johnson, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, declined to condemn Republican lawmakers who recently made Islamophobic comments, saying only that he had spoken to them about their “tone”. Democrats and groups advocating religious tolerance have decried the statements from congressmen Andy Ogles of Tennessee and Randy Fine of Florida, with the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, calling on Johnson to discipline the latter. More here.
Donald Trump said that America First Refining plans to open a new oil refinery in Brownsville, Texas, as part of a $300bn deal. “THE BIGGEST IN US HISTORY, A MASSIVE WIN for American Workers, Energy, and the GREAT People of South Texas! Thank you to our partners in India, and their largest privately held Energy Company, Reliance, for this tremendous Investment,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social on Tuesday.
Donald Trump has appointed Erika Kirk, the widow of murdered rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, to a key advisory board of the US Air Force Academy. The 37-year-old joins a number of other loyalists to the president on the 16-member panel of the academy’s board of visitors, which according to its website “inquires into the morale, discipline, curriculum, instruction, physical equipment, fiscal affairs, academic methods and other matters” of the Colorado Springs military training facility. More here.
Updated